DOC summaries for harmonised standards

Because the statuses of particularly many standards have changed on 03.09.2022 in the Official Journal of the EU in accordance with the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC, we are taking this as an opportunity to draw your attention to the relevant key dates.  
 

Transitional period for superseded standards

If a standard is replaced by a successor in an implementing decision amending a list of harmonized standards, a deletion date is defined for the corresponding predecessor. If an amendment document or corrigendum appears, the date of deletion defines the date from which this amendment is compulsorily applied in conjunction with the basic standard. This date is referred to by the Commission as the date of cessation (DOC) of presumption of conformity.  

To ensure that users have sufficient time to adapt to the new requirements of the new standard, the date of cessation is at least 18 months in the future and thus defines a transition period. During this period, both the predecessor and the successor standard fulfill the presumption of conformity, which expires immediately on the date of deletion.  
 

Summary of DOC dates

The bundled inclusion of standards data in the EU Official Journal results in fixed days on which several standards simultaneously lose their presumption of conformity. Particularly in the case of extensive implementing decisions, this has the consequence that a whole series of standards suddenly no longer fulfill the presumption of conformity. Thus, the deletion of 25 standards from the EU Official Journal on a single day is not uncommon.

It is true that longer transitional periods may apply to individual standards, and that the documents do not fall on this "date of cessation"; however, as the graphs below show, the deletion of standards from the respective Official Journal usually occurs in bundles.

In contrast to the "official" announcement in the EU Official Journal when new standards data are added, users must thus keep track of the deletion of their applied standards, which can quickly become confusing when there is a large number of standards for different legislation.

Information for Safexpert users

Safexpert supports you in the search, selection and application of your standards, and relieves you of work in the CE marking process. As soon as standard data is available in the context of a new implementing decision amending the list of harmonized standards for a directive, or a deletion date is reached, the standard data is updated promptly on the Safexpert Live Server for the respective data packages.

Information about the available data packages can be found on our homepage.